The year of getting fooled

Waking up to 1998

by David Andrew Stoler

Milk Sperm. Right now, that strange term is painted on billboards and building sides up and down Route 95. "Milk Sperm," in four or five incarnations, from dripping black tar scrawled along a highway wall in what looks like a young child's script to a signed, color version representing a just fine sample of the art of tagging. The odd vulgarity of it kind of takes you by surprise each time you see it, the tall letters so in-your-face that you can't help but shift your eyes from the road and the immediate demands of bombing up the throughway at an ungodly speed to the billboard on which the letters are painted.

And so went 1998: on a national level, Milk Sperm billboards and their various incarnations filled our airwaves, our newspapers, and our very consciousness, distracting us from events of utmost import. We fed on a steady stream of eye-candy -- Milk Sperm in the form of X-rated details and basically soft news stories that kept our attention while an amazing amount of actual shit went down almost unnoticed. While countries were bombed, a president was impeached, and much of the world found itself in an even deeper level of economic doo-doo than normal, we focused on the inane, the small and the petty, much to the glee of many of those supplying it.

Indeed, in 1998 we were duped by people with barely hidden agendas supplying us with Milk Sperm. For all the talk of Bill Clinton's media machine, it was his adversary, Ken Starr, who played the media in the most masterful way in 1998. He used the slow leak of X-rated material to focus our attention on only the smallest part of his investigation rather than on the validity of the investigation as a whole. Locally, Mayor Vincent "Buddy" Cianci did the same thing, distracting Providence with the shiny new Fleet Skating Center while the city's education system continued to decline.

And not only did we buy it, not only did we allow ourselves to be taken by the distraction tactics of men like Ken Starr, but we often went to the well of distraction ourselves, salving over morally difficult issues like ethnic holocaust and nuclear proliferation with the balm of baseball, a booming stock market, and, of course, lots and lots of TV -- Milk Sperms of no small order in that they kept our eyes well off the road. 1998 was, if need for a title, the year of being fooled and of fooling ourselves.

Nationally, the cultural year, for all intents and purposes, started not with the actual appearance of that little blue Gap dress, but simply with the rumor of it. The rumor came by way of a leak, which ignited what would become a long string of leaks by Ken Starr -- a brilliant strategy in which the prosecutor diverted national attention away from his clearly partisan directive to undo the election results of 1992.

Starr basically turned 1998 into an Erotic Video Award-worthy porn film, continually supplying "anonymous sources" with clues about presidential "issues" and other unseemly details. And what few salacious details we were slipped we voraciously consumed. Paula Jones said the president had a crooked wanker and that was good, though subtle. Next there was the hint of not just fluids, but fluids on an item which everybody's mother or sister or girlfriend owned.

And it worked masterfully, it got us all -- every leaked mash noted penned to express Ms. Lewinsky's misguided crush was front and center not simply in the tabloids but in the mainstream media as well. Cable TV, the Internet, entire networks, it seems, found their raison d'être: opinion show, analysis, and talk talk talk, all there to make sure we knew exactly when and how Clinton got off.

Starr worked leaks of presidential impropriety like a movie trailer, subtly building our excitement until we were just dying to see the whole thing. Then, on September 9, he filed the Starr report, and all we could do was feed on the gruesome details for which we had been prepped.

Played by the Congress, we pilloried Starr for going into the depth and detail that he did, for dragging the X-rated Oval Office scenes in front of our faces. We watched the news and the cable talk shows, -- and then cooed about Ms. Lewinsky's private emotions and parts by the water cooler. We mocked her naiveté while ogling her sex life as we bought and crowded around the newspapers that printed the Starr Report, the Starr Report paperbacks. We overloaded the Internet with our Starr Report searching browsers, while setting off every NetNanny device on the public cluster.

But bottom line, we allowed ourselves to be fooled, to be distracted from the power given to Ken Starr by the Republican Party that booted his far less partisan predecessor out of the job. For a moment, we forgot the fact that, for all of the millions spent on its writing, the Starr Report simply did not meet its mission goal -- to find out about Clinton's improprieties concerning Whitewater. We were too busy steaming up the TV screen to notice that and the fact that this non-evidence was heading straight toward impeachment.

Of course, Ken Starr wasn't the only one doing the distracting in '98: we also straight-up fooled ourselves. While two warring countries, Pakistan and India, played their little game of atomic chess around one of the biggest population centers on the planet, testing and proving their nuclear weapon capabilities, the thing so many of us chose to do with our downtime was watch as many things like the Clinton mess as we could. In 1998, the Jerry Springer Show, faked or not, beat out Oprah to become the top daytime show in weekly ratings.

The former Cincinnati mayor who was shamed out of office for soliciting prostitution presented a daily helping of people so fucked up that they felt it appropriate to display a stunning array of what would normally be considered emotionally devastating problems on national television and in front of a live and jeering studio audience. And in detail. We heard, often saw, the whole thing -- graphic descriptions of wives cheating on husbands with sons, and all interspersed with actual porn stars and strippers.

So while ethnic holocaust continued for like the sixth year in a row in Eastern Europe, Springer parlayed his revolving door of rednecks, cuckolds, and teen nymphomaniacs into the show that finally dethroned Oprah. Then he scored a book and merchandising deal, and an unrated and top-selling video. And don't doubt for a second that Hollywood took notice of the millions of voices clamoring for their daily dose of human shame -- and upped the ante with the release of yet another quality entertainment option, Ringmaster, the Jerry Springer motion picture.

Locally, the Provcat scene almost directly paralleled the national one. But instead of using smut to distract, like Starr did, our own ringmaster, Mayor Cianci, used the Fleet Skating Rink. Indeed, the $3 million-plus that El Bud sank into the downtown facility created another shiny and attractive Downcity puzzle piece. The center went up so quickly and was so user-friendly that the buzz and excitement it created landed it front and center on our brains and in every news department's opening story.

Funny thing, though -- at the same time the $3 mil was dropped on a project that, though pretty, won't do a thing for actual city infrastructure, kids in Providence started school in rooms that were ill-supplied and overcrowded. In 1998, the Gilbert Stuart Middle School in South Providence opened late (though many parents didn't know it, and brought their kids anyway). And, when it did open, the school had no desks for its teachers, few books for its students, and no locker room for its girls. Even worse, the new B. Jae Clanton Elementary School, which was supposed to solve the overcrowding problem in PVD schools, saw classrooms with up to 34 kids -- eight more than the maximum of 26 allowed.

On a national level, the booming stock market and seemingly sound economic times also acted as a form of Milk Sperm in 1998. While much of the world reeled from an economic collapse that caused and is causing a stunning amount of world poverty, we took comfort in our seemingly

inviolable economic strength. We sat fat and happy while watching Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa take advantage of the expansion year in baseball, smacking homer after homer while ignoring the basic fact that 20 or so of the pitchers serving it up in the league wouldn't have made the cut the year before. We celebrated them and the game that they played, rubbing our obese American bellies with the thought that the world's economic crises couldn't possibly have any domestic implications.

Then on August 21 our own stock market crashed, but no worries: Sammy and Big Mac hit five homers in the next two days. We called the largest point drop in the market's history a "correction."

Of course, that correction had very real implications close to home. But, distracted by Providence Journal stories on the pretty new brick siding of Providence Place, nobody really noticed that the chief financier of the mall, Nomura Securities, and one of its American subsidiaries, Capital America, lost $1.16 billion during the summer. And not even a peep of concern when Nomura announced a vast restructuring of Capital America that essentially would result in the sale of the unfinished mall -- a prospect that could do a number on Providence's vision of the upscale shopping environment to which it sold its tax soul. Instead, there was just another article in the ProJo about how scrum-diddly-dumptious the mall's new tenant, the Cheesecake Factory, would be. Milk Sperm.

And sitting, now, at the end of the year. On Sunday, December 20 four big stories appeared on the front page of the New York Times. The top one, with a war- sized font headline, said that, duh, because Clinton lied about extramarital sexual conduct in the White House, he would become only the second president in the short history of our country to face impeachment hearings. Clinton felt bad, the story said. Really really bad.

The second, in only slightly smaller text, said Senate speaker-elect Bob Livingston would leave office in six months because of just how damn remorseful he was at his own sexual improprieties.

The third talked about the halt to the bombing in Iraq, and showed pictures of both military destruction and human wreckage. And the fourth said that the New York Jets were division champions. Their coach, Bill Parcells, a stolid and serious man, cried.

All four of these things seem ridiculous, each individually impossible, and the four together incomprehensible. The year was chaotic, and we sit now a bit overwhelmed. It's as if, hypnotized by the sex, money, white trash, baseball and cheesecake, we've waded through the year oblivious to anything but it, as if we are only now waking up, numbed, to the true consequences of the events we lived through. Bombs were dropped. The President was impeached. American embassies were ravaged and military retribution for that occurred. 1998 was a serious year, an all-time big year.

But we fooled ourselves into thinking otherwise, and now face some really heavy consequences as a result: poorer and poorer schools and a poorer and poorer world, a Wal-Mart Mall and an impeached president. And all to the upcoming monotony of the former Prince's "1999" set on repeat. (By the end of the year, we are all going to wish the Artist never existed, I promise you.) And, of all things, the Jets are still playing. J-E-T-S Jets Jets Jets!